You are here:

Is there any standard way of deploying TKL on Rackspace? Forgive me if this question has been handled somewhere in the forums, but most discussion I could find was back around 2010, and the general direction it was taking was that it was a vision of TKL to support other cloud providers.

I am a small developer and am more than happy with TKL and how it works with AWS. However, I get a really good feeling from Rackspace and would love to test deplyment there if possible. But if a simple TKL deployment scenario has not been developed, nor intends to be developed, I will not lament for having to stick with AWS. Just curious about developments in this area of "sticking with the main horses" in the cloud providers... I just want to make sure that I'm not mistaken when it looks like TKL has simply chosen to stick with the one horse... AWS.

Thanks all, TKL has totally taken a huge weight off my shoulders with my endeavors.

Although aAFAIK Rackspace are using OpenStack now aren't they? If so you can upload custom images then you can use the TKL OpenStack builds. Otherwise you'll probably have to rsync (like someone posted about years ago). Or maybe you could ask them to host TKL images? Seeing as TKL provide rsync mirrors it's probably not unrealistic for them to do that.

I checked with Rackspace on this, since they offer their own OpenStack images.

The response I got was you can use your own custom OpenStack images, but they don't officially support it on the public cloud servers. (I believe they do support it on private cloud b/c that's what they recommended)

You can always sign up for a free Rackspace account and give it a whirl. Probably not a bad idea anyway as it gives you the chance to test the performance of your application on their servers.

That's one of the great things about TKL b/c you can build your application locally, then move it to AWS, bare metal, Linode, Rackspace, etc. It's amazing how one cloud server performs compared to another.

I see all of this talk about being able to drop a TKL appliance into any space (Like Rackspace as you mentioned in your last paragraph), but what I don't see is any clearcut instructions on how to do so. Everything seems to be geared the the TKL hub, which right now for me is broken.

For example, I want a LAMP appliance on a Rackspace server, you make it sound so easy, is it really?

Regarding cloud hosts (Rackspace, Linode, etc), the deployment of a LAMP appliance will vary slightly because of each hosting company's control panel/setup. But, the concept is pretty much the same. I'm not familiar with Rackspace specifically, which is why I opened a support chat and asked them if it was possible. If you want to go with Rackspace I'd do what I suggested and open up a free trial and see if you can get it working.

Now, say you've got your test LAMP server set up and running on your local machine with Virtual Box and you're ready to purchase hosting and show it to the world...what to do? Well, this is the beauty of TKL.

If you purchase a dedicated, bare metal server....you can have the hosting company install from TKL LAMP in .iso format. Then, login to your bare metal server, which will be a vanilla version of TKL LAMP (none of your data, just the base install). Go to the backup/restore menu, restore your test server and BAM! you're live.

If you want to go the cloud route, for example, I would suggest Linode.com... it's the same concept. Follow linode's walkthrough on how to install from an .iso. Now you have a vanilla version of TKL LAMP running on linode's cloud. Now you can login to this vanilla version of TKL LAMP, go to backup/restore, and restore your local test server to the cloud server. BAM! you're in business. Here's a walkthrough from linode on how to install from an .iso using their control panel http://library.linode.com/migration/migrate-server-to-linode

If you wanted to just test moving between servers, to make sure it works, you can actually make another local, test server in Virtual Box! Set up the LAMP app and leave it vanilla. On your first Virtual Box server, hit backup. Wait a few minutes (or more depending on how large your website is). Go to the 2nd server, hit restore. Now you can see how it works without spending a dollar.

But wait...there's more!

Again, my apologies if you already know all of this, but maybe it might be useful. I got confused initially b/c of Amazon and how it works with TKL.

You don't have to use Amazon....at all, if you don't want to. There are two places where Amazon is (normally) used with TKL.

1. for backup

2. for cloud server

Using Amazon for backup is unbelievalby cheap, and makes it seamless to drop TKL app's anywhere you want. In the meandering examples I gave above, that's what's happening everytime you backup/restore. TKL puts a copy of your TK LAMP app on Amazon for you. I have 2gb of websites on my LAMP app, and it costs me 32 cents a month.

You can run the LAMP app on: virtual box, dedicated server from a web host, cloud server from a web host, etc...all without using Amazon EC2 cloud servers. That is what is so amazing about TKL! they let you pick your hosting environment. For me, as a web developer who only knows enough linux to get by, this is huge. It's such a pain to move between web hosts. TKL let me build a huge website, deploy it to linode, Amazon, and bare metal so I could compare performance and make a choice of which route I wanted to go (ended up with bare metal, $75/mo for 8 core CPU, 8 GB RAM, 10TB transfer).